Samuel Johnson

When men come to like a sea-life, they are not fit to live on land.

Disappointment, when it involves neither shame nor loss, is as good as success; for it supplies as many images to the mind, and as many topics to the tongue.

Happiness is not a state to arrive at, rather, a manner of traveling.

And then, Sir, there is this consideration, that if the abuse be enormous, nature will rise up, and claiming her original rights, overturn a corrupt political system.

Many things difficult in design prove easy in performance.

Nothing is more common than mutual dislike, where mutual approbation is particularly expected.

Patience and diligence, like faith, remove mountains.

Everybody talks about the weather, but nobody does anything about it.

An early-morning walk is a blessing for the whole day.

For things to reveal themselves to us, we need to be ready to abandon our views about them.

Do not hire a man who does your work for money, but him who does it for love of it.

It is long ere we discover how rich we are. Our history, we are sure, is quite tame: we have nothing to write, nothing to infer. But our wiser years still run back to the despised recollections of childhood, and always we are fishing up some wonderful article out of that pond; until, by and by, we begin to suspect that the biography of the one foolish person we know is, in reality, nothing less than the miniature paraphrase of the hundred volumes of the Universal History.

The only reward of virtue is virtue the only way to have a friend is to be one.

Heaven is under our feet as well as over our heads.

It will never rain roses: when we want to have more roses we must plant more trees.

I have found out that there ain’t no surer way to find out whether you like people or hate them than to travel with them.

I have heard with admiring submission the experience of the lady who declared that the sense of being perfectly well dressed gives a feeling of inward tranquility which religion is powerless to bestow.

I tell you there isn’t a thing under the sun that needs to be done at all, but what a man can do better than a woman, unless it’s bearing children, and they do that in a poor make-shift way; it had better been left to the men.

Better keep yourself clean and bright; you are the window through which you must see the world.

We sing in a church, why can we not dance there?

Nature and books belong to the eyes that see them.